What’s New in Office 365
If you’ve ever listened to Julia White, General Manager of Office at Microsoft, speak about Office 365, then you know two things. Microsoft updates Office a lot. As in over 400 improvements in 
one year, a lot. Secondly, Microsoft has decreased the amount of time it takes to roll out a customer-requested update. This has resulted in a good amount of changes that you may or may not know about.
Office 2016 is out!
The first big change is the release of Office 2016 on September 22nd, 2015. I personally have loaded it up and I love it. Here are some features that I think you’ll really enjoy:
- Despite Office reducing our need to email attachments around now and use SharePoint or OneDrive for Business sharing, sometimes an attachment is needed. When creating a new message in Outlook, there is now an Attach File drop down that shows the files you’ve recently worked on. This makes it extremely easy to attach files.
- Word and PowerPoint now support co-authoring. Word has gone one more step to allow real-time changes to be seen by those you are working with.
- Sharing is even easier with the Share button at the top right of Office applications.
- There is an interesting fact checking feature in Office now. If you right click text in a document, you can do a Smart Lookup, which searches Bing. No more second guessing or even leaving your document to check something out.
Delve
Delve has been out for a while now, but if you aren’t using OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online, you’re missing out. Usually, people start the day and check their email. Delve is the second thing that people should check. It learns about your relationships in the organization and shows you the documents that your co-workers are working on, always honoring permissions on what people can see.
This is an extremely powerful tool and Microsoft will be growing it soon into Delve Organizational Analytics, which will help businesses learn how groups of people work together and give insights into what might be working and what isn’t.
Office 365 Video
Video sharing has always been a challenge of SharePoint. Who wants to store large video files in a SQL database? With Office 365 video, you can now host your internal videos easily. There are a number of ways this handy service can be used. Your HR department could host training videos or Directors could host webcasts.
Combine this with Office Mix and PowerPoint and you can have presentations pre-recorded with your voice, video and notes to be watched anytime.
Advanced Threat Protection
How many times have you told Gary in Finance not to click links in unsolicited emails? With Advanced Threat Protection, an Office 365 add-on, Gary’s incoming emails can be scanned deeply for fake links, phishing, and malware.
Advanced Threat Protection is per user, so not everyone needs it. It can be used to protect individuals, like Gary, who deal in sensitive information. It re-routes inbound email for the protected users to a special area where they are scanned for about 10 minutes before being delivered. Hopefully, Gary will stop handing out your bank account and ABA number!
Ongoing Improvements
With all of these improvements, it can be difficult to keep track. These are only a few of the more interesting features released for Office 365 during 2015. We recommend keeping an eye on the Office 365 Roadmap, read the Office Blog, and work with a great partner like Arraya Solutions to help you stay in the know!
If you’d like to open a line of dialogue with Arraya and our team of Microsoft experts, visit us at: www.ArrayaSolutions.com/contact-us/ or reach out to us on our Twitter account @ArrayaSolutions.
